How the West provoked the Ukraine war, in NATO's own words UNSC statement by George Szamuely 31Oct24

Russian Federation weigh in afterwards - Threats to international peace and security - Security Council, 9769th meeting

https://politicsthisweek.wordpress.com/2024/10/31/not-the-bcfm-politics-show-presented-by-tony-gosling-214/

“If ever a war was needlessly provoked, the war in Ukraine is that war”, said George Szamuely, Senior Research Fellow at the Global Policy Institute, noting that this war came about as a result of the Western powers’ “single-minded insistence on scooping up every country on the European continent into NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization]”. Recalling two draft proposals for a new security architecture of Europe, issued by Moscow in December 2021, he observed: “At the heart of Russia’s proposals was a commitment by NATO to no further expansion and no NATO membership for Ukraine.” Furthermore, in its 1990 Declaration of State Sovereignty, Ukraine declared “its intention of becoming a permanently neutral State”. 

Meetings & Events / Security Council / Thematic Debate
Production Date 31 Oct 2024

https://press.un.org/en/2024/sc15880.doc.htm

From February 1990 on, Western leaders were giving Moscow repeated assurances about not expanding NATO, “only to walk back those assurances the moment they had secured whatever concessions they were seeking”. While the Russian Federation’s leaders repeatedly expressed interest in NATO membership, the alliance’s leaders showed “not the slightest interest in exploring these offers of genuine partnership”. As well, Moscow’s leaders were “only too aware that NATO had long set its sights on eventual Ukraine membership”, knowing that it would be “the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite”. He added: “The current war in Ukraine was always about NATO expansion.”

https://webtv.un.org/en/asset/k1z/k1zmul0h6z

The Russian Federation’s representative, noting that the Western States decided to “use the hands of the Kyiv regime” to inflict strategic defeat on his country, observed that “their plans are a fiasco” as the “head of the Kyiv junta” is blackmailing the world by saying that Ukraine will get nuclear weapons. Also pointing to the “military escapades” in the Kursk region, he said that without the West’s direct involvement, Ukraine’s military would continue to retreat. In 2023, Ukraine seized two times less territory that the Russian Federation managed to liberate per month. Following the calls to lower the draft age to 18 to 21 years old, men are fleeing “Zelenskiy’s concentration camp”, he said, reporting that between February 2022 and 2023, over 5 million Ukrainian refugees arrived in the Russian Federation. Also spotlighting the 100,000 to 170,000 Ukrainian defectors, he noted that, since the special military operation’s start, at least 15,000 mercenaries from 100 countries arrived in Ukraine. “The course they [Western countries] have chosen — fighting Russia with using Ukraine’s hands is unjustified,” he added.

With all kinds of arms that keep flowing in, “the battlefield has become a show of weapons”, China’s representative said, emphasizing that “weapons may help win wars, but they cannot win lasting peace”. Noting that “the Ukraine crisis is, essentially, an eruption of the building-up security tensions in Europe, a result of the long-term accumulation and worsening of the trust deficit,” he pointed out that the United States is creating divisions in Europe. “It is precisely the US that has repeatedly discredited China’s peace efforts, constantly [tying] China to Russia and [driving] the wedge between China and Europe,” he stated.

Meanwhile, China’s representative, refuting the comment by the United States representative who spotlighted China’s provision of weapon components and relevant technology to Moscow, declared that his country “has not provided weapons to any party related to the conflict in Ukraine” and “has strictly managed dual-use items” according to the World Trade Organization and market rules. “Who is obstructing peace and who is supporting peace — this is clear to the eyes of the international community,” he said.

The United States’ representative also pointed to the “irony of Russia calling this meeting”, during which he received reports of “8,000 DPRK [the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] soldiers in Kursk oblast” there to potentially join Russian forces against Ukraine. Noting that Moscow’s military cooperation with Pyongyang violates many Council resolutions, he stressed that “even with the addition of DPRK troops, Russian forces will not prevail in Ukraine.” To the representative of the Russian Federation, he asked: “Does Russia still maintain that there are no DPRK troops in Russia?”